Meet Lucinda

Pronuptia Lucinda, 1983

Say hello to “Lucinda”, one of Pronuptia‘s finest wedding dresses of 1983.

I’d been looking on Ebay for a while for a stereotypically 1980s wedding dress, the bigger and the pouffier the better, but somehow I always seemed to end up being outbid by 15p at the very last minute. I had a look in charity shops, but everything they had was too nice, or too far out of my very limited budget.

So, I asked around on Facebook, and a photographer friend said he thought he might have something appropriate lurking around in the garage, from a project that had never come to fruition. He sent it over to me, and it turned out to be perfect!

Pronuptia Lucinda, 1983

It’s a perfect example of 1980s-does-Edwardian, and being a Pronuptia gown it’s really well made. Okay, yes, it’s really well made from 100% nylon (lovely!), but that means it’s survived a trip through the washing machine, and has come out looking great. And best of all, as you can see by the mannequin, the dress is an absolutely perfect fit. I couldn’t have asked for anything better!

There’s a little bit of damage to the bottom ruffle – a hole at the back, and a couple of places where the lace is coming away. There’s also some staining on the lining of the train, where the dress has obviously been wet at some stage… and there’s a mark on the front of the skirt, that might be wine, or might be gravy!

Clearly this dress has had one very good day in its life, but considering the dated style and the damage, I can’t say I feel too bad about making some slight alterations. Details will follow later, but what I will say is that this is for a photo project of my own, mainly involving messing about in the woods in a big white dress. After I’ve taken the scissors to it, that is.

(Oh, and if you fancy a bit of a giggle, Pronuptia have digitised 60 years’ worth of their catalogues, and made them available online!)

New dress, new jacket

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I made Simplicity 1755 to wear to a wedding. Then I realised I didn’t have a smart little jacket to wear with it, so I thought I’d better make one. This is a short bolero hoody, with long bell sleeves. (I drafted the pattern myself.) I couldn’t get any bias binding to match, and I didn’t have time to make any with the left over fabric from the dress, so I bought the least-clashing colour and went with that. What you can’t see in these pictures is the machine embroidery that I added over the top. I thought it would help to tone down the very pale lilac, so there are little leaves embroidered all over the binding. Definitely a finishing touch that I’m going to use again, I’m really pleased with it.

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Here I am, looking wistful in a gazebo. As you do. No matter how hard he tries, Paul just doesn’t seem able to take a decent photo of me, so you’ll often find me staring away from the camera looking a bit grumpy. (Any suggestions that perhaps I’m just not very photogenic will be met with derision. And then crying.)

I’m pleased with the dress, but my lack of a 1950s-style well-defined waist does make it look a bit frumpy. I do need to change the collar though. As you can see, the hook and eye kept coming undone, and that made my brooch wonky, which annoyed me all day. I’m wearing a huge floofy petticoat in these pictures, but I took that off half way through the reception because it was just too damned big and annoying. I have a very low tolerance for uncomfortable clothes, so anything that I have to fiddle with or which makes a nuisance of itself will very quickly be consigned to the charity shop pile. (Or the boot of the car, in the case of the petticoat.)

I will make another of these dresses though, just with a slight alteration to the front neck. And I’ll definitely be making more of these little jackets. The only change I need to make to this one is the hooks and eyes on the front. I think I’ve sewn the eyes on back-to-front (I didn’t realise it mattered!), and the jacket won’t stay closed. But once I’ve sorted out the fastening, I want to make another one with narrower sleeves, and one with a printed cotton lining, and a longer one with pockets, and a fancy one with needle felting… I have a lot of plans for this design!

Rolled hem foot

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I love my Pfaff rolled hem foot very much.

Without it I couldn’t have hemmed Karen’s wedding dress without having some kind of a nervous breakdown.

Thanks are also due also to Gabrielle, whose rolled hem foot tutorial helped me to figure out the tricky business of getting the hem started.

The inside layers of the dress were done on the overlocker, as I didn’t fancy trying to do two more rolled hems on very fine jersey. I thought that might be pushing my luck a little bit.

But the dress is finished, I’m never hemming chiffon again (how many times have I said that now?), and I’ve got a week and a half to finish my own dress to wear to the wedding.  That just needs buttons… oh yes, and the hem.

Handmade Wedding – Part Two

Honeybee Stole
Photo © Jon Stockham

Nicola knitted Anne Hanson‘s Honeybee Stole for me. It took her the best part of a year, and matched my outfit perfectly. She even worked on it while she was in hospital, in labour with her daughter Gwen. Now that’s dedication!

Honeybee Stole
Photo © Jon Stockham

A close-up of Nicola’s Honeybee Stole. Isn’t it beautiful?

Cake
Photo © Tim Dawes

The cake was made by my Aunt, Helen Harrison. I sent her a photo of my flowers, and she reproduced them perfectly in icing. Amazing!

Cupcake Tower
Photo © Tim Dawes

Helen ended up making more than a hundred cupcakes! My cousins Jane and Georgina helped to make all of the little flowers to go on top of them all. The larger cake on the top was a traditional fruit cake, the cupcakes were a mixture of chocolate and plain sponge fairy cakes.

Party Bags
Photo © Jon Stockham

We had quite a lot of children at the wedding, so we asked Paul’s Mum to put together a party bag for each child. They went down really well – Paul’s cousins had set up a craft business worthy of Etsy by the end of the reception! They were making jewellery with lots of sparkly stickers, and having a great time. The little boys loved their cars and dinosaurs too.

Lego
Photo © Jon Stockham

This is an idea we stole from our friends Nicola and Ian. They put Lego on each table at their wedding, so we did the same. We managed to give away Paul’s entire childhood Lego collection, and people made some amazing collaborative creations!

Carved Pumpkin
Photo © Jon Stockham

Because the wedding was on Hallowe’en, my friend Heather and her two boys carved us a beautiful little pumpkin! It had a heart on one side, and our initials on the other.

Mr & Mrs Smith
Photo © Elaine Harrison

My Mum knitted this adorable little bride and groom from a pattern in Simply Knitting magazine. She customised them perfectly to match our outfits. Mum was becoming increasingly agitated when I kept changing my mind about what I was going to wear – and now I know why!

We liked them so much that they came on our honeymoon with us, and had an adventure of their own.

I have to say that we were absolutely thrilled to bits with everybody’s kindness and willingness to be involved. Almost everybody took pictures, and we haven’t seen them all yet, so there’s still more to look forward to! My brother-in-law Tim took hundreds of photos, and even made us a little video. We also received some beautiful hand made gifts, including an amigurumi skeleton bride and groom, and a fabulous quilt.

We had the best day, and many aspects of it were all the more special for having been made for us by our friends and family.

Handmade Wedding – Part One

Paul and I got married on Hallowe’en, which was absolutely ages ago, and whilst I showed you the honeymoon pictures, I haven’t yet posted any pictures of the wedding itself!

Because most wedding photos are of people you don’t know, I decided to concentrate on showing you the things that we made ourselves, or that our friends made for us. That turned out to be an extremely long post, so I’m splitting it into two parts. Today’s is everything that we made ourselves, and tomorrow’s will be about all the beautiful things that were made especially for us.

Stationery

The artwork for all of our wedding stationery, designed by Paul. There were plans for another picture of us in our wedding outfits, but we didn’t have time to make that happen!

Portal Cufflinks
Photo © Jon Stockham

Paul and Bob wore matching Portal cufflinks, bought from The Clay Collection on Etsy.

Buttonholes and Hankies
Photo © Jon Stockham

The buttonholes are made from silk violets and paper roses, with a few sparkly bits thrown in for good measure. The leaves came from the original bunch of violets, and the silver holder is a filigree corset-lace aglet. They’re held on by magnets, so nobody had to poke holes in their clothes with a pin. I also made the handkerchiefs, although they were a bit small and kept disappearing down inside the men’s pockets!

Bouquet
Photo © Jon Stockham

Silk and paper flowers, courtesy of Hobby Craft. Two bunches of silk violets and a lot of paper roses were reassembled into a bouquet. It’s simply held together with an elastic band, underneath the ribbon! The sparkly silver bee is a hair clip, but I didn’t manage to grow my hair long enough to wear it.

Favours
Photo © Jon Stockham

My parents went on a mission to IKEA to buy us a boxload of these little glasses. We filled them up with old-fashioned boiled sweets, from our local independent sweet shop.

Favours
Photo © Jon Stockham

We wrapped each glass in a piece of tulle, and tied it with a ribbon. They’re labelled using Moo mini cards, with the name on one side and the picture of us on the other.

Veil
Photo © Jon Stockham

I didn’t make the flowery feathery fascinator, but I did make the veil. Two yards of tulle, folded along the grain, and gathered onto a hair comb in the middle. Simple!

Coat
Photo © Jon Stockham

This was a bit of a last-minute addition! I’d been planning to make my dress from the purple fabric, and then I ended up buying a dress instead. I had a sudden crisis where I decided that I MUST have a train if I wanted to look like a bride, so I made myself a very long coat. I also added matching silk-covered buttons to the shoes.

We’re laughing because we’d just turned round and seen my Uncle Steve, wearing a bright pink wig!

We laughed pretty much all day, to be honest.

Honeymoon photos!

Juvenile Siberian Eagle Owl
These are the photos from Centre Parcs – mostly of owls.
I’m quite pleased with these, although I missed a lot of great shots of the owls by being much too slow!

London Zoo
These are the photos from London – mostly of the aquarium and the zoo.
Sadly a lot of these are either out of focus, or focussed in slightly the wrong place. I’m going to blame the poor light conditions, the fact that most of them were taken through glass, water or mesh, and the fact that I’ve never really worked out how to make the most of the 200mm lens.

Mr & Mrs Smith Go On Honeymoon
These are the honeymoon photos of a certain Mr & Mrs Smith – who travelled with us wherever we went.
My Mum knitted these little figures for us, and we thought they deserved a little holiday of their own!

I realise that I haven’t shown you any photos of the wedding yet. We haven’t had the pictures back from the official photographer, and we’re waiting for those before we compile an online album. There are quite a few pictures starting to show up on Facebook, and I do have photos of everything that Paul and I made ourselves, so we should have something to show you very soon.

Do me a favour?

We spent most of yesterday putting together the wedding favours.

My parents very kindly made a trip to IKEA for us, to buy the glasses. I set about cutting dozens of squares of dress net and lengths of ribbon, and Paul designed the MOO mini cards that we’ve used as name tags. We bought the sweets locally, from Strange Sweets in the Harris Arcade. Because we bought so many (nine kilos!), Lisa gave us a really good deal!

Once we had all of the bits and pieces ready and waiting, it only took a couple of hours to put them all together. Paul and I put on plastic gloves and divided all the sweets into the glasses. Then Paul held the net squares in place while I tied on the name tags.

Now they’re all boxed up, complete with a table plan, and ready to be taken over to the wedding venue this afternoon.

I think that’s the very last thing that we actually had to make. Now we just have a million other things to organise before the weekend…

Laura’s beaded wedding bag

Laura's beaded wedding bag

I don’t like showing other people’s wedding things in their entirety before the wedding, so this is just a little snapshot of Laura’s beaded wedding bag.

The ivory silk dupion was already beaded and embroidered. I removed some of the clear beads, and replaced them with red ones. You can also see the pretty flower shaped iridescent button, there in the bottom right hand corner.

Laura and Rob are getting married in September.

Congratulations!

Nicola’s Wedding Dress

Nicola & Ian's Wedding

Nicola’s wedding dress started life as Vogue 2903, an original 1957 pattern. We made surprisingly few changes to accommodate the fact that the Nicola was six months pregnant!

I had to do a full bust adjustment, and let out the waist a tiny bit at all of the seams. The main change we made was to add lacing up the back, just in case of sudden growth.

We also decided at the last minute that sleeves were entirely over-rated, and left them off. I bound the armholes with matching bias tape.

The silk is a very fine and lightweight dupion from Fine Fabrics of Harrogate. (Hi Sandra!)
It’s made by James Brindley, and the colours are “Forest” and “Ocean”.

The silk was beautiful to work with. I had to keep replacing the needle in my machine, as the silk blunted it very quickly, but other than that I had no problems at all.

There was no matching ribbon on the face of the planet for lacing up the back of the dress, so I made about a mile of bias tape, and rolled the ends like shoelaces so it would be easy to thread through the eyelets.

Oh, and I also made shoelaces for the bride, five ties for the groom and groomsmen, and eight brooches for the ladies… and I did it all in just eight days!

I do like the Internet.

Yesterday, Mamfa popped by specifically to leave a comment that she’d seen a pair of Those Shoes in a size 5, in a shop in Leeds.

Mamfa doesn’t know me, she saw my post via the friends list of a community that we both visit. But she had some useful information, and took the time to leave a comment and pass it on. Wasn’t that kind?

Further investigation reveals that the shoes are now back on the Schuh website, and that my local branch apparently has a couple of pairs in stock.

Hopefully Liz and I will have our wedding shoes after all. 🙂

While I’m on the subject of awesome shoes (when am I not?), you could do worse than to check out Em & Sprout’s Etsy store.

Are they not the most adorable shoes you’ve ever seen? So cute!